Set in the early 'fifties, the scene
is a dingy flat in London. Hester Collyer has left her husband
– a judge – to live with Freddie Page, an ex RAF pilot who is
younger than her. Freddie is unreliable, drinks, plays golf and
is inconsiderate.
The play opens with Hester trying
to commit suicide. She is found by the landlady responding to
a smell of gas – noticed by the couple upstairs. A German doctor
revives her. Throughout the play Hester tries to find Freddie
– he says he’s leaving because of her attitude – she tries to
stop him. By the end, Hester is strong and leaves. Freddie wants
her to stay.
"What a bastard," said the lady behind me as Rattigan's Freddie
Page announced he was leaving his lover, Hester Collyer. But that struck
me as an excessively moralistic reaction to a play whose precise virtue is
that it doesn't moralise: as so often, Rattigan's deals, in this 1952
classic, with the inequity of passion and the pain of living.
If the play still works, it is because Rattigan combines the classical
unities with an ability to empathise with all his characters. He certainly
understands Hester, the judge's wife who has abandoned her Eaton Square
existence because of her destructive love for Freddie. But his sympathy
also extends to Freddie himself, the displaced war-hero unable to cope
with Hester's sexual and emotional intensity. And Rattigan is equally
non-judgmental about Hester's baffled husband and the struck-off doctor
who rescues her from one suicide-bid and argues her out of another.
All this emerges clearly in Thea Sharrock's sensitive production.
Harriet Walter is a first-rate Hester in that she combines the right
upper-class aura with the sense of a woman who has achieved passion only
in mid-life: left alone with Freddie, she shows the fierce sensuality that
lies behind the surface propriety. But Walter also has the priceless
Rattigan gift of excavating sub-text: there's a key moment when, in the
act of polishing Freddie's shoes, she pauses just long enough to indicate
that she knows that her world is about to be blown apart.
But all the actors are alert to Rattigan's subtlety. Robert Portal's
Freddie is a decent, clubbable type struggling to survive in the emotional
deep end. Neil Stacy's bemused High Court judge is so cushioned by the
good life that, for all his affection for Hester, he can't disguise his
instinctive distaste for her cheap plonk. And Roger Lloyd Pack makes the
struck-off doctor both Rattigan's raisonneur and a natural outcast who
intuitively understands Hester's suicidal solitude.
The paradox of this remarkable play is that it achieves its effects
through the kind of emotional reticence which Rattigan sees as the English
vice. And my only cavil is that Rachel Blues's design has none of the
"dinginess" specified in the stage-directions which turns this Ladbroke
Grove flat into a declasse Heartbreak House. With its ostentious descent
and rise, the set is clearly intended to imply the life-potential that
still awaits Hester. But, although this expressionist touch is at odds
with Rattigan's hermetic realism, it cannot damage the impact of a play
that blends emotional honesty with a powerful microcosm of 50s England.
• Until September 27 and then on tour. Box Office: 020 8940 0088
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Richmond Theatre, London 
